Kickstarter

Comments

1. 1. 

      Creator Orphic Software on December 14

      @Solar, we're planning (and working on) video updates showing off all of what you mentioned :)

   2. 

      Creator solarempire on December 14

      @Orphic Thats what i wanted to hear, thanks! Any chance we got to see a typical town scene which shows some of those npc daily routines + some cool music in a coming update maybe? Together with a full day timelapse to see the different light situations, please. :)

   3. 

      Creator Orphic Software on December 13

      They will, yes!

   4. 

      Creator Godewijn on December 13

      Looks very promising and seeing the Guard follow the NPC and arrest the player reminds me of Ultima 5 hehe. Will NPCs have Work/Sleep/Eat/Relax routines as well? (I assume so since you want to go for a world like found in Ultima...)

   5. 

      Creator Orphic Software on December 13

      @solar, the rat in the maze was merely for the sake of demonstrating Antharion's pathfinding capabilities. In an actual game, the way a monster approaches your party depends on a combination of factors including: your party's overall power, the monster's power relative to your party, the monster's temperament, the monster's ai type (conjurer, healer, ranged attack, melee, or some hybrid), monster's hp, your hp, monster's sp, etc. Monsters in the actual game have a certain awareness of the player which diminished over time and through space, the monster must keep his sights on your party and continually update his awareness of your party in order to pathfind his way to you so line of site is inextricably linked with the monster's ability to pathfind, cast spells, or do whatever else.

      Antharion's engine generates waypoints depending on the map's layout, then it calculates the paths between everyone one of the waypoints so it always knows the shortest path between any two that are connected - otherwise known as an all-pairs shortest path approach.

   6. 

      Creator solarempire on December 13

      Regarding that rat in the maze: I wonder if that would be the right kind of pathfinding a rat would possess in a realistic setting? How does it know what the correct path is? A realistic AI should simulate errors too?
      I just hope that not every enemy we see in the game rushes wildly towards the our party. I hope there are restriction for line of sight (so we could sneak past an enemy) or even "area of hearing". A different thing could be interest in the party, with high interest an enemy would attack our party because he hopes for treasure or because he feels intimidated, otherwise a poor rat or minor enemy would probably just flee from us, at least when we got stronger and wear big armors and weapons.

   7. 

      Creator Orphic Software on December 13

      @Christoph, we originally used an A* but later switched to a highly-optimized preprocessed waypoint system that ended up being much faster and just as good.

      @Ghun, There's no scripting going on, aside from the guards' dialog when he catches up to you. The behavior is generic, though it depends on the individual NPC's temperament. For example: an aggressive NPC who loves fighting won't even bother going for the guard, he'll just attack, a timid NPC may just run away, etc. Sometimes the NPC may yell and alert other NPCs who themselves will run in search of a guard. And once a guard is alerted he'll call out to other guards in the vicinity. We find this system works quite well in terms of producing interesting and emergent behavior.

   8. 

      Creator GhanBuriGhan - WOOS Wose on December 13

      Nice work on the NPC behavior. I always hate it when NPC are oblivious to stealing, and I wouldn't have expected it to be handled so well in this game.
      A question though: Is this behavior generic (e.g. the NPC will try to find any guard in the vicinity) or scripted for each specific situation?

   9. 

      Creator Christopher M. Carter on December 13

      Nice update. I love the use of white walls and floor tile in the video!

   10. 

       Creator Christoph Wagner on December 12

       Heh, that pathfinding reminds me of the robocode assignment for A* we had in one of my university classes ;)